


Kronologue

by nodere



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 20 years post Zarkon, Aged-Up Character(s), Also starring the Lions, It's not a sheith story per se, M/M, Midlife Crises, Other, What-If, and Lance's, at what point does a person’s potential become irrelevant?, but the relationship is important to their sections, introspective, yeah i went there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-01 11:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11485677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nodere/pseuds/nodere
Summary: Twenty years have passed since the defeat of the Galra Empire. The universe is at peace, the reconstruction having brought justice and stability to her many peoples. Once heroes, the Paladins have gone their (mostly) separate ways, though middle age does not necessarily come with ease and grace.The Lions are returning for their paladins. Can they live up to what they were? Do they even want to?An introspective in five parts.





	1. Keith - Of What The Stars Are Made

You hear the phone ring and turn your head cautiously toward it from where you’ve stationed yourself in the armchair. It hasn’t done that in years, at least not since the landlines were dismantled as relics of a bygone age. You still smile cynically when you think about it, the way the Fed has gone soft in this new “era of intergalactic peace.” Someday the cellular towers and satellite receptors will be taken out by a coronal mass ejection from the sun, or perhaps, like last time, an invading people from another galaxy all together will jam the signals across the globe in a military advance to seize your world. You believe in facts, science, hard work, sex, and human nature. There are a great many other things you believe in too, but hope? That’s one of those things you gave up a long time ago.

You imagine your father standing beside the telephone. For hours he’d been there, sitting on a stool, wringing his hands and wiping his sweaty palms down his thighs. He had tried to smile at you, but his mouth had only cut a sharp line across his face. When the call had finally come, your mother was dead. Later that night, he left, and that was the last time you or anyone else ever saw him.

The phone rings again. Three. Four. Five.

Then it stops.

Grunting and covering his head with a pillow, the man on the sofa shifts his position and pulls the blanket over his shoulder. The rise and fall of his breath offer up a stable security. It’s been yours for nigh on two decades now. You contemplate the planes of his face, the curves of his body, his girth. He’d let himself go. You think that being back is too much for him even though it’s been years since the defeat of the Galra Empire. He’d been going so hard, on so little, that he needed to rest. During the short period that the two of you had shared in that respite, it had been bliss.

Now? You try to recall what it is you liked about him in the first place. Tell yourself you’re disingenuous. Tell yourself again that convenience and comfort are the reasons you stay. Go on, do it.

There’s a grander lie at play here.

You were Shiro’s everything.

It was not something you’d ever given much clout to, that something about you could be special to someone. You never understood what Shiro saw in you, but you took it in stride and accepted it for what it was.

He’d never left you because he wanted to and you are very much aware of that.

_How did you know to come find me?_

You’d made something up, but in fact, your instinct had told you.

And you would travel beyond oblivion for him.

So what happened?

The universe now was the aftermath of Voltron. After the parties and grandiose celebrations, all the two of you had wanted was to return home, and yet you were no longer the same people you had been. War had seen to that.

When was all said and done, you had opted for anonymity.

The numbers on the simulation unit at the Galaxy Garrison no longer mattered the way they had when you were fresh and new. No one knew you had flunked out of flight school or that your records were still unbroken. No one knew you had challenged the Galra Emperor himself to a one-on-one duel, that you were the Red Paladin, the Blade of Marmora.

That in the end, you, who were all of these things had gone to the frayed out threads at the edge of the universe, across folded space and unbound time, to bring Shiro back.

Domesticity fits you poorly, but you made it work. Then there had been the motorcycle accident, and everything fell apart.

You remember when you stopped wearing your wedding band, recalling to mind the reason you did with the clarity of the midday sky just outside the window, the sun and desert heat having burned away the clouds. It hangs there suspended in the blue that reminds you of the vastness of the ocean turned upside down and someone else, but that was another time, another place, and it’s not important anymore. You forget to stop before you feel the tingle creep up the backs of your arms, the heat well in your chest and drip slowly down into your gut as your throat tightens and saliva pools in your mouth. You might have to jerk yourself off in the shower tonight because you thought about that and the thought betrays a nostalgia at once pleasing and repulsive.

The ring had just slipped right off, one of the easiest things you’d ever done. You’d felt so very out of love; and in a mood, you’d set everything you touched to fire and watched it blaze to cinders. You’d left it on your nightstand, but it was no longer there, probably having rolled off onto the floor and wedged between the wooden slats, desiccated and warped from years of trodden use, somewhere beneath your bed.

The bed you sleep in alone, while Shiro sleeps on the couch. He rarely leaves that couch.

What would become of him without you, you wonder. Neither of you ever learned to cook properly, and since the accident - now a milestone in the estrangement of your relationship - you’ve subsisted more and more often on a diet of cheese puffs and canned goods. You could brew a mean cup of coffee. You still can even though you don’t. That is about the extent of your usefulness in the kitchen.

Someone else from your past would have been horrified. You don’t think about that friend often, but when you do, it’s like missing a brother, if you can imagine having a brother, or any sibling for that matter.

The goddamned phone is ringing again. Irritation wells within you as the shortwave radio in the corner of the room begins to beep, something whirrs to life from the den, the faucet in the kitchen turns on, the fuses all blow, and the digital clock plugged in beside the mantel blacks out. Outside the generator pops, clatters, then goes silent after a bang so loud it sounds an explosion.

You see Shiro shudder from the corner of your eye and bury himself further into the covers and cushions.

You sigh. Your tired shoulders don’t wonder who is going to pick up the call; you know how this scenario ends. After a deep breath, you gird yourself for the inevitable, straighten your back, and ease forward, the sharp sting shooting up your thigh from your knee, and then through your spine vertebra by vertebra, the hard throb persisting all the way to your temples as you bend. You grab the hilt of the dagger from off the coffee table and settle back in your chair. Hefting the familiar weight in your hand, you pull it back and throw.

The trajectory the knife takes is clean and precise. Perfectly balanced, it turns the exact number of rotations you’d expected and lodges itself where you’d intended. The blade is embedded deep into the phone, through the plastic shell and rotary dial, weeping plasticizers from decades past, cutting through the internal web of wires and panels.

Take that.

Another memory and another old friend laughs at you. You laugh together at the wreckage of this dated technology. There’s a reason you left that phone on the wall. She tells you you’re paranoid.

The truth of the matter is that she is correct.

Motes of dust disrupted by your despondent and childish outburst settle back into the light, diffused through the hazy film on the window.

Silence sounds around you. You can hear yourself think again.

And then suddenly the ringing is back, and you _know_.

This time, through the blinding red that skirts the profile of your vision, you hoist yourself to your feet, and you clench your jaw tight, forging ahead.

The accident, as it were, has left your leg a twisted mess of nerves and scar tissue with a crushed knee that no longer bends properly and has no other particularly notable use aside from being the cause of your bad temper and general malaise.

You’re ready to cut it off if that will give you back your life.

Shuffling along to the door you let yourself outside.

The hair on your forearms rises with goose bumps, and the temperature drops sharply as the wind picks up, raking its fingers through your unkempt hair. It’s an old-school parlor trick, a disturbance in the electromagnetic field, although it doesn’t explain the running water. Shifting your gaze around, you recognize the Altean sigils forming overhead like an ancient summoning circle emitting a fuchsia glow as they light the sky. You watch _her_ materialize as she drops through the center. The sight leaves you breathless.

In all her glory, she stands before you, the sheen of her mechanical body as familiar as the back of your hand and as poignant as that very first memory. Red like the blood you bleed, the great giants of the cosmos before they begin to collapse and dredge up the dust of ages in their wake. Red like fire and the core of the earth. Red like your molten heart.

Once, in what seems now a lifetime ago, you had gone to find her, this great sentient lioness. She had saved you then from the void of space, plucked you out of the vacuum because you had shown her trust.

You focus so much on her that you nearly fail to notice her companion exit the wormhole behind her, the spectral trail off the feathers of his wings scorching heat shimmer before he folds them back behind him.

“Shiro!” You call, wondering if you are heard.

The man joins you, lumbering forward, his excess mass having become another barrier between the two of you as much as a wall between him and the world. You stopped caring when he stopped caring.

Stop lying to yourself. You never stopped caring, but gave up when you felt that everything making you who you are had been stripped from your very being.

The same incident that left you crippled had taken Shiro’s prosthetic arm. No replacement for that existed on Earth, and he’d even admitted a desire to rid himself of the part of him that was Galra. Once, when he had been well over the safe limits of intoxication. You doubt that he’d realized what he’d said when it had come out of his mouth, or that he even remembered it afterward.

That, combined with his pride and a sense of outdated chivalry prevented him from contacting those who could help.

_“There are needs out there far greater than mine.”_

Yet now look at yourself. Look at us. How did we let this happen?

You wish you could hate Shiro for his selflessness.

Sometimes you still wish you could rid yourself of your Galra parts, too.

The lions are magnificent in the sunlight. The gleaming enamel and polished metal speak volumes. They’ve been cared for, and they’ve been waiting. They stand in the grit and sand, resplendent and regal.

Twenty years.

You’re in your late thirties, a jaded and broken misanthrope and more reclusive than you’ve been since the failed mission to Kerberos. That one event took away the thing you treasured most in this life, crushed his spirit in a gauntlet of terror, tortured him, and left him little more than a husk of the person you knew. Age hasn’t worn you down, but time has gotten away and one-upped you with its passage.

She’s standing there waiting, and you want so badly to run to her. She did, after all, return for you. But you can’t, so instead, you balance on your good leg and grip the post at the edge of the porch until your knuckles turn white. The searing pain rips through you, the embarrassment you feel at that moment almost makes you turn your back.

But you’ve long since learned there’s no escaping yourself.

He takes your hand. You haven’t held his hand in so long; you’ve almost forgotten the way his strong fingers lace between yours, the hard press of his ring, the gentle squeeze.

Almost but not quite.

He knows and forgives you all of it. No one’s life is quite so simple.

“We’re going home.” You say, and as you speak the words, more for your own benefit than his, you know them to be true. You falter as you try to take that step. Frustration builds a steep crescendo.

And yet.

Shiro is there, pulling you to him and speaking your name, a quiet chorus to the tagline of your lives. When had you forgotten he loves you? When had you stopped believing that you love him in return?


	2. Pidge - A Matter Of Philosophy

“A tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it. Does it make a sound?”

You repeat the question aloud to yourself, turning the words over in your head, mulling them down to syllables, phonemes, letters, the disruption of the air, the wave that travels to your ear.

Frequencies.

In your infinite wisdom, you decide that no, no sound is made. Except you also know that the relationship between space and time is relative, that the order of the universe is elegance out of chaos. The Fibonacci Sequence is as beautiful as a sunset. Fractals define the edges of snowflakes and the rings of Saturn. The Golden Ratio is everywhere, the patterns of seeds in the face of a sunflower, the eye of a hurricane, the petals of a rose.

The spiral arms of the Milky Way.

There is music in the spheres if you care to listen.

Like the falling tree.

You sigh deeply, accepting that this dependency on logic and reason has been and always will be your lot in life.

One foot in front of the other you trudge along between the sentinels, touching their trunks and branches lovingly with your palms as you pass. Rotting leaves beneath your soles glisten with dampness from the earlier storm. The ground is slick, but you’re small and lithe, your balance is centered, and your galoshes give you good enough traction. You’d much rather be inside, but there’s not much you can do about that. It started as a tightness in your chest and a tingling in your limbs. You’d thought you might be having a heart attack, there’s no such thing as being too young for a massive myocardial infarction and it wouldn’t surprise you if your body just gave up and gave out. It’s been through so much, and while you possess a sharp mind and the mental fortitude for survival, you were never built for war.

When it happened, you were eating dinner with your automated companions. Rover Mark III hovered beside you as you shoveled spoonfuls of soggy cereal into your mouth. You almost took yourself to the clinic. Grabbing your wallet and keys from the counter, jamming your feet into whatever shoes were beside the door, you rushed to the garage, flung wide the door of your lime green MINI Cooper, and plopped yourself into the driver’s seat. Fumbling, you eventually managed to stab the keys into the ignition, but before you could turn it, everything stopped. The quiet was so profound you could hear the blood rush to your head and the beat of your heart as it resumed its slow and steady thump-thump against your ribs.

A long, low whistle blew through on the wind, but you’d never heard wind sound like that.

That thought lingers at the back of your mind as you make your way farther in. You wonder why you didn’t think to bring your phone. What if you get lost out here? Who’s going to come find you? Your robots? Don’t be silly, you don’t have a Jeeves. Rover doesn’t count.

Yet.

You’re working on that. You have entire laboratories working on that, well, similar concepts. You’re the director of JPL, and your unique knowledge and application of technologies from other civilizations throughout the known universe are going to bring Earth to the forefront of development in just a few more years. You have this planned out, and you’re right on schedule.

But here you are, taking a strange impulse walk through the forest behind your cozy cottage in the middle of the night.

At least if you’d remembered your phone, you’d have GPS.

Pidge is resourceful, and she should have remembered. She _would_ have remembered, but Katherine Holt is a different creature. She’s not terribly different, but she’s that little girl all grown up. Brilliant, creative, and witty, she conducts herself with poise and decorum. She doesn’t play with the supernatural. The last thing anyone would ever catch her doing is traipsing through trees in the dark on a whim and a fancy.

You wish you had Hunk’s infrared goggles or Keith’s strange cryptid night vision.

There it is again, the sonorous air that drew you out here in the first place. Like the beating wings of a butterfly against your cheek, the soft call beckons, and then it hits you with such force you stagger backward and brace yourself against the nearest tree. The heart of the wood ebbs beneath you. The sap flows freely through the rigid, fibrous cells. Everything around you smells _green_ , so sharp and fresh. You know exactly what this is.

Your clutch at your chest. Warm, wet tears roll down your face.

_I’m coming, girl!_

You start to run. You don’t need to see to know where you’re going. You can feel it, pulsating through your veins, throbbing at your temples.

The ozone stings your sinuses, already irritated from your allergies, and you didn’t take your meds because you hadn’t expected to be outside so long. Twigs crunch beneath your feet with each connecting beat of your stride.

You never really missed earth when you were gone, and you certainly don’t feel a great attachment to it now. But you are attuned to her nature and empathetic to her plight.

 _She_ beckons.

You went home to your mom with your brother, and while you didn’t stay long, you stayed just long enough to say goodbye properly this time. As a child, you hadn’t understood what you had done to your mother, yet you imagine her now as she might have been then. Even through mourning the love of her life and the loss of one child, she had been unable to accept that they might be gone for good. She helped you break into the Garrison, and she believed you when you told her what you’d found, but none of that changed the fact that one year later, you’d vanished and left her with only the dog.

You couldn’t take the stricken way she looked at you, the hurt in the lines of her face coupled with the deep and endless love.

You never found your father, and you still consider that a failure on your part. The prisoner processing data you’d used to find Matt had been corrupt, and even after the dissolution of the Empire, you remained unable to discover where your father had been taken.

You and Green searched every mining colony, every prison, every workhouse, every factory and industry supported by the Empire’s penal system. He was nowhere to be found.

For a while, you worked with Hunk, aiding and assisting with the new universal order. You were the only two who stayed. Shiro couldn’t, Keith didn’t want to, and Lance said he’d return to the Castle but never had. Something happened among those three, and you’re not entirely sure what. You’re not certain you want to know either. Relationships were always tricky things.

Robots can’t hurt you the way that people can. There’s no predicting the impulses and attachments of someone else. There’s also no way of predicting your own, and when you consider the fact that you’re now alone, you understand that it’s really just as much your fault as it is anyone else’s. Your mind drifts briefly around that thought, but you refuse to entertain it further. It was good while it lasted.

You and Hunk went to work in development. Most of what you did was damage control, looking for holes and tasking yourselves with fixing them. You posed as diplomats, but it was a sorry thing to see and realize that the Defenders of the Universe had not stayed to see through the reconstruction.

And so, in the end, when you realized your usefulness had run its course, you returned again to Earth. It hadn’t felt like home since you were sixteen. Now that you were older, it still didn’t, but you made your peace with that as best you could and forged your place in a society from which you’d been consciously absent for over a decade.

You never really belonged anywhere either before or after those too-brief years when you’d been a Paladin of Voltron.You didn’t know what to do.

You gave up your lion willingly, but it didn’t hurt until you were far away from the Castle. You felt the bond stretch and fray, the ends of the worn line breaking and snapping back. The quintessence made you stronger, but you also built up a tolerance. You know that what had happened to Zarkon was also happening to the five of you. Too little left you wanting, and your threshold was getting higher. Classic addiction.

You can sense it now, lacing her voice like a drug that tempts, you feel it in your legs as you stretch, racing faster. It dawns on you that you haven’t been paying attention to direction at all, but glancing up, the clouds have parted, and you see the stars above through the canopy. When you’re traveling the stars, everything is different, but you have communications training, and you know how to navigate. None of that ever left you, you just recall it up from the files stored away in your brain box. Something tells you you’re going to need it.

Her impatience and agitation are ripe and you know she is as anxious to see you as you are to see her. Your breath comes hard and fast. You haven’t put this much physical energy into anything in years. Unexpectedly out of shape, you suck in air, snort back the snot in your nose, and spit it out again.

_I’m coming!_

But you stop because you’re there. Her muzzle is lowered to the ground, paws at either side, sitting like a resting sphinx, but expectant. Eyes alight to illuminate your path and she continues to watch, to wait as you clamber up to her nose before you drop to your knees and let go of the sob that had caught in your throat just minutes ago.

She’s here. Here to make you whole again, to help you heal the emptiness that fills you.

The Green Lion wouldn’t be here without a good reason. Somebody out there needs _you_. You don’t even care if she takes you right now, no preparations, no goodbyes, just as you are.

“So, if a tree falls in the forest,” you ask yourself again, panting and out of breath, but you stop because you already know how this ends. In this reality it’s you. You’re the one who heard the sound.


	3. Lance - Once You Were In Love

Once you were in love.

“Have you ever seen the ocean burn?” On tiptoe, he whispered in your ear, braced against your shoulder. Pointing toward the horizon and the last light of the setting sun, he turned to you, the flash of green in his violet eyes.

He set your limpid heart afire.

You weren’t the object of his affections, but you were the recipient of his lust, and you craved it the way you crave each breath of air that fills your lungs, like food and sleep and…

...water.

You wish that you had ever been as raw. His kinetic ferocity was what had attracted you to him in the first place. You struggle to forget that sometimes.

The relationship the two of you shared was tenuous at best, and the last time you saw him was when he’d run away from the person who loved him best. Competing with that one was impossible; it wasn’t an affection you found yourself able to reconcile. At least not easily.

So you never touched another man, and you married and married and married again. The repetition ebbed and returned with the tides.

That’s not really what you mean. It’s you. _You_ came and went with the moon.

It’s not something you possess the energy for anymore, nor the stamina. Your well of feeling runs so deep that sometimes you have to distance yourself to keep from drowning. It might be said you care too much.

The last flame had burned out to embers shortly after you married her. You tried your best to keep it together for a while, but the effort was an exercise in futility. The divorce is settled, and you might never get to see your little girl again. That might be the hardest part. She has your tawny skin, your chestnut hair, and her eyes are bluer than the edge of the thermosphere.

Something about her recalls you to space. Perhaps if fortune smiles on you again someday you might even be able to take her there. In the meantime, you have some idea of what her mother says about you: that your tales of flying lions are tall and that the reason you can’t hold down a job has everything to do with the habits you keep and the addictions you feed. She says that you are nothing, the scum ring in her tub that permeates the bath and is impossible to remove. Why she ever fell for your charm and charisma, she’ll never know. She hates the way you talk about Blue in your sleep. She says you love that whore more than you ever loved her.

It wasn’t worth arguing with her on that point. She thinks a flying lion is a metaphor. While you’re pretty sure you’ve only ever been _in_ love once and that you are now very much _out_ of love, you love Blue more than you love life itself. That much is fact.

Now that you’re thinking about it, you’d best remember that the truth in all of this is that you were lonely. A bond had been brutally severed and cauterized that left you feeling as if you’d been drawn and quartered. That analogy is perfect. Pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you’re clever; no one else is going to do it. The five of you were everything to each other; when you were together, you were one. Close your eyes and feel their seven phantom hands upon your beaten back

Whatever you do, Lance McClain, don’t cry.

You only meant to return for a short visit. Being here now was that trip extended almost twenty years, but your friends are still here, friends who know you intimately, who take you unconditionally as you are and as you were. Yet you’ve grown distant through the years. Hunk calls once a month, and Pidge sends the occasional text or email, but whatever Shiro is up to is completely beyond the reach of your search skills. He’s probably off doing something with Keith.

Keith.

Why did you have to go and name him?

You want it to be good, and you want them to be happy. Anything less is a waste of the most perfect romance you’ve ever been privileged enough to witness.

Keith.

One might think that fire and water are inherently incompatible, but you know better. You need both to forge a sword, both to build a perfect storm.

It started rather poorly. It wasn’t until you were much older did you realize that the first time you met him, he’d been feeling just as much anxiety as you. He hadn’t meant to be rude, he just didn’t know. It was the difference between having a family and having none, between growing up in a social environment and not. When you introduced yourself and extended your hand, he probably wondered why a stranger was talking to him. You can hardly believe you wasted two years thinking that he hated you.

In all fairness, he thought you hated him too.

Later you learned that Keith’s capacity for empathy might outweigh your own, and that is a heavy admission for you. You stood by him because he was your friend. Through everything he had and had not asked of you.

He came for you when you were stranded; he rescued Blue when you could not.

At the very end, he went back into the imperial flagship for you, with the guns blasting and the wreckage burning. Without hesitation. Zarkon had been defeated, Lotor was dead, and you had already resigned yourself to your fate, knowing you had performed your part flawlessly. You spoke your final confession into the abyss of the blown out hull where you hung suspended, gripping the precipice, the rocket booster on your back crushed by the girders and I-beams that had fallen in on you earlier and it was only luck that preserved you still.

You were never so grateful for your gleaming white carapace as you were then, clinging to the ship. Blue was incapacitated, your helmet long gone along with your Bayard, and the dire reality of your situation sapping what hope remained.

When you felt his hand around your wrist, you thought you were dreaming. When he pulled you from the wreckage, you thought you were dead.

The very sight of him became your last communion, and you think about that often.

You haven’t talked to God since.

The relief that washed over his face when he gazed down on yours and smiled at you colored your heart just a little. It caused your breath to catch in your throat.

That was the only time you ever saw wetness at the corners of his eyes, and when he said, “I thought I lost you,” you knew he spoke sincerely.

Your soul might be blue, but everybody’s heart bleeds red.

Your heart had certainly bled.

So why does this life feel like borrowed time?

Years passed before you could ask him why and when you finally did, his brow creased in confusion as he studied your face, jaw set like it always did when he tried to put complex thoughts into words.

“Because I had to.”

Did he mean he’d felt compelled?

“Your nobility and selflessness allowed us to win that war. Because of you, we got to go home.”

You could hear it, unspoken in his tone, _“I wish my motives were as genuine.”_

He made you feel important without stroking your non-existent ego.

Sighing, you know that even if you never see him again, he’ll always be your friend. He was there for you when no one else was. You had expected that person to have been Shiro, but your hero was just a figurehead, and he’d had other demons to contend with.

Wars are fought, and wars are won by many. By people like you, like the five of you come together. Never before had you felt so complete. Never again would you.

There’s a noise outside, and it wrenches you back to the present and away from the oculus of your mind. It’s familiar and not, as if something you had imagined suddenly became reality. You look out the front window, ignoring the weedy brush of your tiny lawn and the “For Sale” sign staked there by your ex-wife’s realtor. There is nothing to see except the waves crashing into the sand, the clear blue sky, and the bright disk of a wormhole opening before the glare of the sun.

The fuchsia radiance captivates your gaze. You cannot turn from it.

Slowly emerging like a mirage from the rippling heat haze come the silver paws you know so well and the glow at the end of a tail casting its lantern light against the cresting whitecaps.

You suddenly wish your daughter were here to see this.

You aren’t making this up. There she is, the Blue Lion descending from above, dramatic entrance on the incoming tide crashing around her feet. Flinging the door wide, you stare at her, sparkling and fresh as when you first met. The surging warmth extends toward your mind, and you are open to her as if you’d rent your chest apart.

She is too much. You set down the glass of whiskey you’ve been nursing all morning and sprint across the dunes to her, your long legs carrying you as they did when you were young, the aching in your joints forgotten in the moment. Lowering her head to you, the flicker in her golden eyes lets you know that she sees your tears and that in her own way she feels them too.

You start at your own reflection in her polished muzzle, the paunch at your middle, the slope and slight stoop of your shoulders, your thinning hair and receding hairline, the exhausted lines of your face.

Vain as ever, you suck in your gut and brushing your hair forward with your fingers, square up your breadth and arch your back.

Reaching into your pocket, you do the thing you didn’t do last time. You’re older now, you’ve learned. You pull out your phone and wiping the salt from your face, put on your mask with your sparkling lopsided grin. Quirking a narrow brow, you snap a selfie in front of the mechanical lioness. You text it to your mom and your ex-wife. You post it to your social media accounts.

That this day might ever come had never occurred to you. Everything had left or been taken away, yet here _she_ was; returned for you.

Remind yourself that you’re still relevant.

Remind yourself that you matter.

You’re going, and you aren’t looking back.


	4. Hunk - Between A Rock And A Hard Place

“Honey!” she calls, her voice the disparaging tone of one who has been asking for weeks, three to be precise, and you cringe involuntarily. “Will you please get that giant metal cat out of the front yard?”

You sit directly between the front door of your home and the enormous lioness crouched in the lawn. She has flattened her mechanical body into the earth and rests her head directly upon her paws. For days she’s been watching. Every morning she’s there as you head out for the day. You herd your beloved horde of three tiny children into your Jeep, take them to school, then drive in to work. She’s there at the end of the day when you bring the children home again and file them back to the house. One large golden eye watches fondly while you and your lovely wife make dinner for the five of you.

The routine is good. It brings with it a certain ease of comfort. Your employment with the Corps of Engineers allows you to exercise your brain, the kids are on the way to and from your job, and the culinary arts have always been your second calling.

You know what you need, and you know who you are.

You’ve kept that cat out here waiting for you for nearly a month. What are you going to do about it?

Sighing deeply, you lean back on your elbows into the envelope of the lush, green lawn, side-eyeing her. The cat, not your wife. “I’ll see what I can do,” you think to yourself.

“Why are you here?” You ask the question out loud, knowing it is unlikely you’ll get a direct and concise answer. You can assume that there is a need and instead of a new pilot, the former Yellow Paladin is somehow more qualified. You know, there’s just some credibility that gets applied to one once they’ve defeated the Emperor of the Universe.

This is suspiciously unlikely, though. You are approaching forty, and while daily exercise has helped you maintain your physique, which you’re proud of, realizing you’ll never be as trim as Lance or as cut and jacked as Shiro, there is absolutely no reason fresh young blood can’t form a new bond with the Yellow Lion. In fact, it had been your suggestion that Coran train new soldiers to prepare the next generation of Voltron paladins so that the five of you could live out the rest of your lives in peace.

It was a good idea at the time, and you still think it is a good idea. Although, while the lifestyle wears well on you and you work your advance toward middle age with ease, you’re certainly not there yet, and you’re not entirely convinced it was the right move for anyone but you.

You’d stayed on with Pidge for a handful of years during the reconstruction era of the Empire. Duty called, and you’d already committed so much to the cause you couldn’t imagine not seeing it through to completion. The thing was, you weren’t entirely sure what completion meant or how long it would take to reconfigure the system to something more akin to the democratic ideals for which you’d assumed you’d been fighting.

You have so many feelings about this, though. For starters, you are well aware that many of the people you would have considered oppressed did not, in fact, consider their own situation anything less than satisfactory. Some places you landed were downright hostile when you appeared as a Paladin of Voltron and told you to leave no sooner than you had arrived. Others hadn’t any idea their way of life was one of usury and oppression. You distinctly recall the Balmerans, and you wonder who gave you the right in the first place.

You hadn’t wanted to remember Shay, who had fallen beside you at the end, her sacrifice memorialized in the monuments of the war. Once, you’d thought you might have been able to make a life together with her, but that fantasy was much shorter lived than you could have imagined at the time.

You had no stake in this war, no direct link to it. Supposedly the Earth had been in danger, but you question the truth of that statement, and you’re not entirely sure Allura and Coran hadn’t rearranged the facts to persuade you into staying.

Your enlistment into the ranks of Voltron was one of necessity, but necessity for the alien princess and her advisor; it certainly hadn’t been for you. It had taken weeks to acclimate to being in space, and you are still not sure you ever want to go back. The earth is very solid, and you wiggle your toes in the sun.

This is better grounding for you anyway. No one on Earth even knew what Voltron was except perhaps for the military and the other four Paladins. You think it’s funny that the five of you are back on Earth, and you’re not entirely sure how to interpret that.

At present, you’ve concluded that it is only an interlude.

Whatever comes next in this bittersweet danse macabre, you approach as realized adults. You understand that your formative years were spent as warriors, and your view on everything now is poignantly colored by those experiences. The final developmental stages of your human brain ended with the war. You hope the ensuing years have instilled you with the wisdom you will need on whatever the next part of this journey will be.

The kids come out to join you. They ask you to tell them, again, about the Yellow Lion, likely prompted by their mother, still awaiting an answer. It’s validating in a way you didn’t know you needed to tell them the stories of your adventures, leaving out some of the less important details, but never pulling the punches or the reality of what you did.

Warfare was something you’d never understood before you’d become a part of it. Most people don’t, you’ve found, and it’s not a thing easily explained. By the time you were born, there was no one left alive who had witnessed the sheer destruction and devastation wrought by the atom bomb, and you’re certain that the country you call your own doesn’t give itself enough credit for the horrors of what it wrought. Harness the power of the sun and hope you don’t destroy your own homeland in the process.

For what it’s worth, you’ve seen weapons worse, ones that can destroy an entire planet, created by people who had their entire planet erased from the universe. You’ve seen it in action, and nothing compares to the resonance you felt pulsating through your heart when millions of voices panicked the moment they were snuffed out of existence. People, families, entire civilizations suddenly obliterated, and your assignment had been the postmortem report.

It hadn’t just been Zarkon and his Komar experiments, or Lotor following the path of his father. Allura had succumbed as well. Eliminate the Galra threat by removing their stores and suppliers. Desperation clouds judgment when you’re losing a war.

Or is it better to sacrifice a few to save the many when not all can be saved? Who was it that said no nation wants her citizens to have a universal orientation, where the allegiance of the people is to all creation and not just the planet?

You can’t remember, but you could wax on for days over the moral implications of war and the responsibility of such a power.

Your youngest is standing before you, her arms open and her liquid black eyes imploring, asking you for a hug. You take her small warm body up against your own. This is your creation, your home, your place. Mussing her thick dark hair, you reassure yourself that she is safe, eyes darting over to the mechanical lion that has taken up residence in your front yard.

The relationship you’d nurtured and left with the Yellow Lion is one of mutual respect. She’s given you time, but you know you only have so much.

You thought you were done.

You were done.

She has to go back, and your wife knows this too.

You look at her longingly as she leans out the window, her expression full of compassion and understanding tinged with the sadness that has permeated her very being over the last several weeks.

She knows; she has known, but she still hopes that you’ll send that “godforsaken” beast back whence it came. The realization hits you like a boulder. You ran hard, headlong into your own living nightmare. That’s pretty much what this is, isn’t it?

Closer you hold the child in your arms, two more trailing, your own imprinted ducklings following at your feet. Her plump, tiny arms don’t want to let you go as you gently pry them from around your neck and hand her off to her mother.

For what it’s worth, you know you’ll be going. You don’t really get a choice, that was stripped from you when the lion appeared.

Considering the situation carefully, you know that the lion wouldn’t be here if whatever needed doing could be done by anyone else. Your heart is too big to ignore the plea her presence belies, and you know you can’t take your family.

“Look, I’m going to go find out what she wants, and then I’ll be back.”

You pause, unsure of yourself for just a moment, ever the cautionary realist. “But if I don’t,” you say, “I love you.”


	5. Shiro - For Something Greater

You’ve exceeded your expiration date.

Look at yourself. Yes, you. Take a long, hard look.

Do you see that person in the chair beside you? The innocence of sleep relaxes his sharp features and creates the illusion of peace, but he should have taken you out with the trash years ago. What’s your purpose, what do you even do?

Nobody needs the Black Paladin. Are you even the Black Paladin anymore? The last word on that was Coran had started a training program for the next generation of Voltron pilots.

If anyone saw you now, would they recognize you?

Bury your head in the throw pillows and try not to groan.

The old rotary dial telephone on the wall rings. That’s odd. The landlines haven’t been serviced in decades, but then again, nothing fazes you. You’ve known magic and ghosts, been kidnapped by aliens. You led an elite mercenary team into the heart of certain darkness and emerged from it victorious.

The horror.

When things happen to Takashi Shirogane, they happen big. Only after the ensuing chaos of the Empire’s dissolution was put it to its end were you able to rest.

Only now, you’ve been resting for well on twenty years. You’ve stopped enjoying the beauty of the world around you. When was the last time you woke early enough to watch the sunrise? When was the last time you lingered through dusk on the rooftop to gaze up at the stars?

You can’t remember.

You can’t or you won’t?

The map of the sky is very different from Earth. You hope Keith is still sleeping and steal a glance at him. Once, you traversed the firmament together, explored the constellations, fucked each other inside the cockpit of the Red Lion while hiding under cover of radio blackout within the Gossamer Ring of Jupiter.

At present, the closest you get to that is the bulk barrel of lurid orange cheese puffs sitting beside the sofa where you’re currently pretending to nap and the Playboy channel. However you look at it, it’s not that close.

While you think about it a lot when was the last time you took his hand in yours and gazed into his eyes?

When was the last time you told him you love him?

Hold that thought for a moment.

You know you can always change the narrative. Why don’t you? You don’t believe in fate. If you did, you would be accepting that everything that has happened to you throughout this life has a purpose and that the specific sequence of events could never have happened in any other way.

Divergent timelines would not exist, but you know they do, they’re just not yours. You wonder if Prince Lotor would be dead regardless of whether or not it was by the ironic twist of your Galra hand. There were, after all, five of you and countless agents working against the regime. You aren’t special; stop trying to escape the truth of what you did. The Galra made you a weapon, and when the Altean queen regnant recruited you, you didn’t stop and think about what you agreed to do.

You know.

Remember when you were heading back to the hull of the ship, to where you knew the Galra crown prince lay in wait. You recognized him the instant you saw his blade spark against the honed edge of the Red Bayard. The fluid grace, the strength, the speed, all of it spoke to you and sang your name. You remembered him from your time as a captive. His hair a snow white blizzard that whipped around his form while his opponent matched him hand and foot. Keith glistened as if fresh from rain, but it was drops of sweat and crimson blood that flew around him and rolled down the white exoskeleton of his armor. You watched for just too long, unable to look away.

Keith was so beautiful then. He still is, but at that moment he was, all of him, pure and selfless with an intensity to bring the Empire to its knees. You saw the Blade of Marmora slide into Lotor’s chest with deft precision. It missed his heart.

Galra anatomy isn’t quite the same as yours.

Keith realized his mistake too late, just after you’d stepped in, knocking him aside with everything you had left to muster because you had seen exactly where Lotor’s blade was headed and you could afford to block its trajectory, you earned your opening.

You look at Keith as he sleeps, and you resent the fact that you have killed for him sans guilt or regret. After a year in a gladiatorial pit, after you’d vowed to never do that again, to never be that person you’d had to be in order to survive. You couldn’t see any other choice, and while you know that nothing is ever black and white, there’s a reason your favorite color isn’t gray.

You could have let him be killed.

Don’t be absurd.

How many timelines exist where you chose to let Lotor win that fight, where you chose to pass by and ignore it?

None of this Keith’s fault and never will be, and you keep these thoughts to yourself and store them away to unpack again later. But you know how deep it cuts. When he looks at you, his face is sad and distant; a fortified wall divides the two of you. It is cruel, you think, and yet he is just as responsible for his actions as you are for yours. Hold him accountable; you know he is, after all, only human.

But he’s not. Even if he passes, his extra set of canines, the five-chambered heart that beats arrhythmically in his breast, the downy softness of his body hair, and the dark tips of his pointed ears hidden in his hair all belie his heritage.

You don’t have to place blame. You don’t even have to discuss it. But you have to do something.

You remember the day he took off his wedding band. The frustration on his face was something you hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t anything you’d done, it was everything you hadn’t. It was your refusal to help yourself, your way of just letting life pass.

Any discussion you just kept deflecting, but you couldn’t put it off forever. Eventually, you had to admit that the animosity you felt toward yourself might be rooted in what you’d been forced to do and the choices you’d neglected thereafter. That in itself is a choice.

Don’t reduce your experiences to some vague sentiments about dissatisfaction and guilt then pretend you don’t know what you’re talking about.

“You don’t get to decide how important you are to me. You don’t get to dictate how I’m supposed to feel.”

And in another very real sense, you’d cut him where it hurt him most. It’s taken you years to learn that he viewed your disregard toward yourself as indirect disregard for him.

He slipped the silver ring off of his hand and smacked it down on his nightstand. A week later, you pocketed it.

If there weren’t even just a shred of affection left in him, he wouldn’t still be here with you. He doesn’t cling to delusions and fancies.

You just called yourself out. How do you like it?

Approximately 96% of the universe is empty space. So often you bear the weight of all that emptiness distilled down to discrete singularities, like pinpoints on a timeline. In contrast, he is an overabundance, and he can fill that void with his everything.

Together you tend to come out somewhere in the middle. At least you did.

You know that the two of you are not star-crossed lovers. There is no truth to the fancy that you will always know and find one another. No, your bond is stronger than that, forged in the corona of the sun and tempered to your love.

He would do anything for you. You know that, right? Even as you are now. Despite the fact that he hasn’t touched you in, how long has it been?

Ignore that.

Just as you were there to protect him, he’s always been there to protect you as well.

He came for you when you escaped captivity the first time. He came for you the second. He found you in your truancy and dragged you back to where you need to be. You’ve been absent from your own life more often than you’ve been present.

It’s what happens when your element is the cosmos, and you’ve never dealt well with being grounded.

You suddenly think about the choices again, and you doubt Keith would ever stray from the choices he made regarding you.

The phone is at it again.

Keith is pretending to take no notice, but then he picks that knife of his up off the coffee table and hurls it at the phone, impaling the receiver through, pegging it to the wall.

The ringing only pauses for a second or two.

This time he gets up and heads out the front door.

Watching him limp along the dusty wood floor sets your heart to aching. You survived a war and an accident on the way home from the grocery disabled both of you.

He puts on a mask and pretends he is fine, but his leg remains twisted to a grotesque and unnatural angle. You know he’s in pain. Perspiration beads up at his temples and slides down his face, along his jaw through his disparaging scruff.

Collateral damage destroyed your Galra arm. You didn’t want to ask for a replacement because it would mean you’d have to face your past and your present and that thought terrified you more than this new reality where you had to accustom yourself for the very first time to only having one hand.

Not that you deserve much better. If you hadn’t been there, that accident probably wouldn’t have happened. In fact, a lot of bad things tend to happen when you’re in the mix. It all began with you. If you had just left that silent, loner cadet alone when you’d met him, back when you were not yet twenty and he something just past seventeen, his current state of affairs would be a whole lot different.

Stop following this rabbit hole of what-ifs down to its inevitable conclusion, and stop telling yourself you deserve nothing.

Just.

Stop.

Go out to him.

All you see through the open door is the glowing Altean blue of the Black Lion’s wing feathers fanned out before the setting sun and the brilliant light of the wormhole. They radiate, and it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the glare and focus on his face. The silver muzzle shines, newly polished.

You didn’t even notice the Red Lion standing before him as he folds his wings at his back.

“Shiro!” Keith calls your name but doesn’t turn.

The lions are magnificent in the sunlight. Coran must have seen to it that they were cared for. Allura said she’d hidden them away. They were, after all, her lions. Why have they returned to you?

You ask this to no one, and in all honesty, you know it doesn’t matter.

He wants to run to her, but instead, he stands at the edge of the porch and grips the post. Desire evidenced in the tense, almost carnal way he stands there, his presence at the very edge of reality.

You think he might disappear and immediately take his free hand in yours. His skin is soft and smooth and warm as you lace your fingers between his, squeezing. You breathe relief.

You remember why you stay.

“Everyone in the universe has a family.”

Everyone comes from somewhere, but sometimes you make your own family. Despite or perhaps because of everything you’ve been through together, this is your family right here, this one person whom you had gladly moved the stars for, whom you would a thousand times over die for. Here was that one person who had never given up on you no matter what, who had come to find you whenever you’d been lost. Wherever you’d been lost.

You love Keith more than you’ve ever loved that lion, and Black knows it. Your decision in this matter is implicitly tied to the man beside you.

“We’re going home,” he says.

You shake your head; he’s wrong. You pull him to you and speak his name, a silent prayer for recompense and renewal.

“We’re going back,” you correct. “Home is wherever I’m with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be a Coran story with a monster plot and all that, but when I started hashing out the details of how he would convince the Paladins to return after 20 some odd years, I realized I was more interested in the finer details of why they would or would not want to return.
> 
> I also thought it would be more interesting if their consciences spoke to them, sometimes sympathetic, occasionally making digs, so unstable 2nd person POV it is. 
> 
> While I presented this from the perspective of the Paladins all ending up back on Earth, I honestly don't think that would be the case. Pidge, Lance, and Hunk might at least go back to say goodbye to their families, but they probably don't belong there anymore.
> 
>  
> 
> And just because it's funny, my inspiration for Shiro was an artwork by Richard Prince.
> 
> Imagine a collage composed entirely of Spongebob bank checks marouflaged onto an enormous stretched canvas. Stenciled in block letters through the central third of the canvas is the following:
> 
> "A guy goes to the doctor and says… Doc I got this terrible case of discolored penis. The guy shows the doc a bright orange penis. The doc had never seen anything quite like it and asks about his daily routine… any prescription medicine, any unusual athletics?? Nope says the guy. The only thing I do anymore is lay around eating Cheetos and watch the Playboy channel."


End file.
